The U.S. Navy’s latest ship, the USS Little Rock, is trapped in Montreal. Thanks to fast-moving ice, a short stay in Canada could last as long as four months until the ice melts and allows the Little Rock to join the rest of the Navy at sea.

The USS Little Rock is a Freedom-class littoral combat ship built by Marinette Marine on the shores of the Menominee River in Marinette, Wisconsin. Designed to operate off coastlines and in shallow water, littoral combat ships can carry out anti-submarine, anti-mine, anti-surface, and amphibious warfare missions. Little Rock and her sister ships are small, fast, and agile.

Unfortunately for the crew, the ship was not agile enough to escape the rapidly advancing winter ice. Commissioned in Buffalo, New York on December 16, the ship stopped in Montreal for a routine visit before heading for the East Coast via the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Once in Montreal, a “historic” cold snap caused sea ice to form faster than expected along the seaway, which authorities promptly closed for the season. According to Weather.com, the percentage of the Great Lakes covered in ice increased from three percent on Christmas Eve to 30 percent by January 6.

The St. Lawrence Seaway is the only way in and out of the Great Lakes to the open ocean, and it typically stays closed until March. The Navy has accepted that the 389-foot long, 3,400-ton Little Rock won’t be able to get under way to her home port of Mayport, Florida until the seaway reopens.

Arkansas has a unique opportunity to take part in a historic event on Saturday, December 16, when the commissioning of a new naval vessel, the USS Little Rock, will take place.

The ceremony will be held in Buffalo, New York, where the original USS Little Rock, which was decommissioned in 1976, now sits as a museum ship at Buffalo and Erie County Naval and Military Park.

The commissioning ceremony will be broadcast live from New York, and a watch party will take place at the Ron Robinson Theater in Little Rock beginning at 9 a.m. on the 16th. This is the first time in the Navy’s 242-year history that a new ship has been commissioned alongside its namesake ship.

“The commissioning itself is a huge event,” said Ron Maxwell, the coordinator of the ship’s Namesake Committee and a Navy veteran himself. Approximately 30 Arkansans, including Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola and North Little Rock Mayor Joe Smith will be representing Arkansas at the Buffalo event, which has already closed ticketing after receiving far more than the anticipated 5,000 registrations.

“There’s a lot of history and protocol that goes into the commissioning of a new ship,” said Maxwell, who served on the USS Oklahoma City, the sister ship of the original Little Rock, in the 1970s. “There’s a full week of activities, with parties, receptions and other events” including memorial services, luncheons, sporting events and a tour of the ship.

Though the ceremony itself is sold out, those who wish to view the ship in person may do so in Buffalo during Commissioning Week.

The ship is the ninth of 15 new Freedom-class littoral combat ships to be built.

These ships are made for shallower waters and can get closer to the shoreline than larger ships can, and instead of propellers, they use waterjets for propulsion. The ship also has a helicopter pad and a small boat ramp, and it can be used by small assault forces. The ship’s name was chosen by former Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus – a former Mississippi governor -- who served on the original USS Little Rock in the 1970s.

Interested local citizens who wish to experience the sold-out commissioning ceremony are encouraged to come to the Ron Robinson Theater in Little Rock’s River Market on the morning of Saturday, December 16, for the live-stream event. Doors will open at 9 a.m., and the ceremony begins at 9:45 a.m. The event is free and open to the public, and refreshments will be served. Seating is limited to the first 300 attendees.

There's a saying about punctuality: "If you're on time ... you're late."

The crew of the US Navy's newest littoral combat ship, the future USS Little Rock LCS 9, is taking that saying seriously.

Originally scheduled to arrive at Canalside in Buffalo on Friday, Dec. 8, the ship is now scheduled to arrive four days early, at 9 a.m. Monday, Dec. 4.

The commissioning ceremony for the future USS Little Rock LCS 9 is scheduled for 11 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 16, at Canalside in Buffalo. This date has not changed.

"With the early arrival, people will have four extra days to get a look at this state-of-the-art warship," said Maurice L. Naylon III, chairman of the USS Little Rock LCS 9 commissioning committee. "We'll also have four extra days for the men and women of LCS Crew 109 to experience all that Buffalo and Western New York has to offer."

The commissioning committee is working on plans for an official "welcome party" for the ship when it arrives Monday. Naylon said the all-volunteer committee has been hard at work for months planning for the ship's arrival and the various events during "Commissioning Week" Dec. 8-17.

The fact the ship will be in Buffalo four days early will not interfere with the committee's plans or the ceremony, which is sold out. The general public will be able to see the USS Little Rock LCS 9 while the ship is docked at Canalside. A schedule of events for "Commissioning Week" is available at www.usslittlerocklcs9.org.

Canalside will be open during the week so the general public can view LCS 9 without a ticket. However, Canalside streets will be closed to vehicle traffic. Visitors are encouraged to use the NFTA Metro Rail to get to Canalside.

Canalside will be a secured area and anyone visiting Canalside during "Commissioning Week" will be required to pass through TSA-type security screening.

This event is historic for LCS 9, her crew, the Navy and all of Buffalo and Western New York, as this will be the first time in the 242-year U.S. Navy history that a new ship is commissioned alongside her namesake - the original USS Little Rock, now on permanent display at the Buffalo & Erie County Naval & Military Park. That ship was in service from Aug. 27, 1944, until her decommissioning in November 1976.

From Niagara Frontier Publications - Wed, Nov 29, 2017

USS Little Rock arrives Dec. 8, but
getting a tour will be tough!

By Lou Michel
The Buffalo News
Published November 26, 2017
Updated November 27, 2017

The chances of getting a tour of the new USS Little Rock when it arrives here early next month for its commissioning are not good.

But if a close look at the ship at Canalside will satisfy your curiosity, that's doable. In order to get near the ship, you'll first have to pass through an airport-style security checkpoint at Canalside.

Security is a high priority for the Navy's newest $440 million warship, according to officials involved in arranging for the historic commissioning. It's the first time in the Navy's 242-year history that a new ship is being commissioned adjacent to its decommissioned namesake. The old Little Rock is anchored at the Buffalo & Erie County Naval and Military Park.

When the ship arrives at noon Dec. 8 for the start of commissioning week festivities, a temporary fence will be in place around the perimeter of Canalside, where streets in the vicinity will be closed to vehicular traffic. Marine Drive, however, will remain open, except on Dec. 16, the day of the commissioning.

Throughout the week, there will be prearranged tours for Buffalo school students and members of veteran organizations, according to Daniel Mecca, vice chairman of the local USS Little Rock LCS9 Commissioning Committee.

Will Keresztes, the Buffalo school's chief of intergovernmental affairs and community engagement, said students enrolled in the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps at public and charter schools will receive priority for the tours.

"For students who have demonstrated their interest in a military career through JROTC, this is a very meaningful opportunity," he said.

The district, Keresztes added, will have the chance to showcase the talent of the Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts Choir whose members will sing the national anthem at the commissioning ceremony, which starts at 11 a.m.

"This will be a profound moment for our students and remembered by them for their entire lives," he said of the upcoming performance.

When the commissioning ceremony concludes at about 12:30 p.m., there will be public tours of the ship, but Mecca cautioned that with an estimated 9,000 people already planning on attending the commissioning, it will be unlikely that everyone who wants a tour will be accommodated.

USS Little Rock Commander Todd Peters said his crew will do its best to accommodate everyone who wants a tour, but, "we will have to stop at some point in the afternoon, evening."

No more tickets left for USS Little Rock's
commissioning ceremony

By: T.J. Pignataro
The Buffalo News
Mon, Nov 20, 2017

Next month's scheduled commissioning ceremony of the new USS Little Rock LCS 9 has been the hottest ticket in Buffalo.

On Monday, the commissioning committee ended registration for the Dec. 16 event at Canalside. No more tickets are left.

We have seen an overwhelming request for tickets and capacity for this
event at Canalside has been reached.‚ said Maurice L. Naylon III,
chairman of the local commissioning committee.

Nearly 9,000 people requested tickets, Naylon said.

"We have reached the limit for attendance given the layout of Canalside
for the commissioning of the USS Little Rock LCS 9," Naylon said.

It doesn't mean the public will be shut out of seeing the U.S. Navy's
newest warship. The ship will be docked at Canalside for more than a
week between Dec. 8 and 17. More information about its visit can be
found at: www.usslittlerocklcs9.org

Lockheed Martin makes its combat ship more lethalas new Navy competition heats up

By: Morgan Brennan - CNBC
Published 2:00 PM ET Sat, 18 Nov 2017

On the Wisconsin shore of the Menominee River a new 3,000-ton
Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ship sits docked in the water. It's
already been delivered to the Navy by Lockheed Martin and it's already
active.

A crew of 50 live aboard and have been conducting tests for six months
on nearby Lake Michigan. Next month, the warship will be commissioned
the USS Little Rock before deploying to Florida.

In addition to automation that has cut crew size in half versus more
traditional ships of this size, interchangeable "mission packages," and
a top speed of 40 knots, the close-to-shore warship will tout something
else: the ability to vertically launch Hellfire missiles (also made by
Lockheed) to target threats on land, sea and in the air.

It's one of the ways Lockheed is looking to make the controversial ship
more lethal. It's a strategy meant to not only silence critics and snag
more orders, but better position the top defense contractor for one of
the biggest, most-anticipated new Navy contracts.

"This is a warship," says Michele Evans, Lockheed's vice president and
general manager of integrated warfare systems and sensors, a
multibillion dollar Naval systems portfolio that includes LCS and the
Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system.

"It really looks to bring vertical launching systems, take advantage of
a lot of what we develop with Aegis, and eventually, we could even look
at having a laser-based system on this.

"So, we see the growth potential and I think there's a desire as the Navy looks toward a future frigate."

That future frigate is the Navy's "future guided missile frigate" or
FFG(X), a competition for a next-generation small combatant ship to be
based off of an existing small surface combatant (like for example,
LCS).

Last week the Navy released a design request for proposal that's
expected to be awarded next year, the last step before selected
contractors build their concepts. Officials met with industry on Friday
to review the hundreds of pages of guidelines.

The final contract is set to be awarded in 2020, with the program
likely to be worth about $15 billion, according to Roman Schweizer, a
defense analyst at Cowen. It's expected to span at least 20 ships.

Lockheed says it will "absolutely" bid for the frigate, but with the
competition still in early stages and many details unknown, it says
potential partners are yet-to-be-determined.

It already has company. LCS co-prime Austal has also said it will
compete. An Australian company, Austal has a shipyard in Alabama where
it currently makes the Independence-class Littoral Combat Ship. Of the
29 ships under contract, Lockheed has 14 and Austal has the rest.
(Based on the fiscal 2018 defense bill, three more are expected to be
procured, though the breakdown of those orders is unknown.)

General Dynamics' Bath Iron Works has also said it will participate,
and analysts expect others like Huntington Ingalls to bid as well.

Lockheed and Austal may have some hurdles to mount. The Littoral Combat
Ship has seen no shortage of critics, including Senate Armed Services
Committee chair John McCain, who has repeatedly slammed it as an
example of defense-related waste and inefficiency.

"Initial cost overruns more than doubled the cost of each LCS,
development costs for the ships and their modules now exceed $6 billion
dollars, and they keep rising," the senator said at a hearing in June.
"Meanwhile, key warfighting capabilities of the LCS including key mine
counter measures and antisubmarine warfare have fallen years, I repeat
years, behind schedule and remain unproven."

Responsibility can go around for those challenges, to the contractors
but also the Navy itself, which changed criteria even as the earliest
ships were being built.

For its part, Lockheed Martin says those growing pains are behind it,
as production has ramped to full-rate. It now takes about three years
from start of fabrication to delivery, explains Joe DePietro,
Lockheed's vice president of small combatants and ship systems,
compared to "in excess" of five years for the very first Lockheed LCS
called USS Freedom.

Also worth noting, while price varies per contract and vessel, a LCS
still only costs about $500 million — double the initial target price
set in the early 2000s — but still a fraction of the billions spent on
a Navy destroyer or cruiser.

New USS Little Rock has Official Chicken Wing Recipe

By Lou Michel
Published Fri, Nov 17, 2017
Updated Fri, Nov 17, 2017

The Anchor Bar is on board with the official chicken wing recipe for
the new USS Little Rock, which makes its grand appearance here next
month.

Earlier this fall, the ship's crew had a competition to see who could
make the best chicken wings and Mineman 1st Class Tyson Wilborn won
with his "Pineapple Teriyaki Wings."

In honor of the Navy's newest warship being commissioned at the Buffalo
and Erie County Naval & Military Park on Dec. 16, the Anchor Bar,
which is credited with inventing Buffalo-style chicken wings, will
increase its menu to include Wilborn's mouth-watering magic for the day.

Signs on tables at not only the¬† original Anchor Bar on Main Street in
Buffalo but its locations in Niagara Falls, Williamsville and Amherst
will encourage customers to give it a try, said Mark Dempsey, vice
president of the Anchor Bar.

When reached for his reaction, Wilborn texted, "That would be awesome."

And while Wilborn's recipe is far from the flaming hot wings
Buffalonians devour, this recipe is sure to have strong appeal among
those who have a sweet tooth. An Off Main food critic who sampled
Wilborn's wings can attest to that.

But don't take our word for it. Whip up the sauce yourself and try. Here's the recipe:

26 ounces teriyaki sauce or glaze.

12 ounces honey

6 ounces pineapple juice

1/2 cup brown sugar

Heat and mix all ingredients until uniform.

Done!

USS Little Rock commissioning events announced

A week-long series of events and celebrations are now on tap for the December 16th
commissioning of the new USS Little Rock LCS 9 at Canalside.

Joshua Robinson, WGRZ-TV
November 10, 2017 12:40 PM EST

BUFFALO, N.Y. - The commissioning of the new USS Little Rock LCS 9 at
Canalside will happen on Saturday, December 16th, but now there are
plenty of other events scheduled to kick off the historic day.

The ceremony at the waterfront will be the first time in the Navy's
242-year history that a ship will be commissioned alongside its
namesake - in this case, the USS Little Rock cruiser docked here in
Buffalo.

On Friday, December 8th at 12:00 noon, LCS 9 and her crew will arrive
at Canalside escorted by the Edward Cotter Fireboat. The public is
invited to come to Canalside and welcome the ship to Buffalo.

On Saturday, December 9th at 2:00pm, the Army-Navy Game watch party
will be hosted at Buffalo RiverWorks. The public is welcome to watch
the big game with the crew and their families.

On Tuesday, December 12th, the Katharine Pratt Horton Buffalo Chapter
of the Daughters of the American Revolution is hosting a Gold Star
Mothers Luncheon at noon.

Friday evening, December 15th is the Commissioning Committee Chairman's Reception and Gala at the Hyatt.

And Saturday, December 16 is the big day! At 11:00am, the
Commissioning Ceremony takes place at Canalside, followed by a post
commissioning reception for all attending the ceremony. This reception
will feature wings, pizza, beef on weck and more.

Tickets to the Commissioning Ceremony are free, however registration is
required - and seating is limited. Anyone that would like to register
for tickets to the Commissioning should visit the Commissioning Committee website.

Due to the space limitations for the Commissioning, demand for tickets
will be greater than the supply of available tickets. More than 5,400
people are already registered for tickets.

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) The commissioning of USS Little Rock will take place on Saturday, December 16.

The Canalside event will officially mark the ship‚ entrance into the U.S. Navy fleet.

I was delighted to receive word from Commander Todd Peters, Commander
of the future USS Little Rock LCS 9, that the ship‚ commissioning will
officially take place on 16 December 2017 at Canalside in Buffalo,
Maurice L. Naylon III, chairman of the Commissioning Committee, said.

The ship is expected to arrive in Buffalo on December 8 for a week-long celebration.

If you have already registered for tickets, they will be sent to you
two to three weeks prior to the commissioning date. A ticket and a
government-issued photo ID are needed to enter the commissioning site.

Here is a schedule of events:

Friday, December 8 at Noon ‚ LCS 9 and crew arrive at Canalside, escorted by the Edward Cotter Fireboat.

Saturday, December 9 at 2 p.m., Army Navy Game Watch Party hosted at Buffalo RiverWorks.

Tuesday, December 12‚ Katharine Pratt Horton Buffalo Chapter of the
Daughters of the American Revolution hosts Gold Star Mothers Luncheon
at noon.

Saturday, December 16 at 11 a.m. ‚ Commissioning Ceremony takes place
at Canalside. The ceremony will be followed by a reception for all
attending the ceremony. The reception will feature chicken wings,
pizza, beef on weck and more.

'New' USS Little Rock a tribute to Buffalo,

Navy's proud past

by DAVID F. SHERMAN
Managing Editor, Bee Group Newspapers

Forty years ago, it was just a dream. A lofty idea about creating an
inland naval park on Buffalo's gritty, abandoned waterfront.

In 1976, in conjunction with the Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency, the
Buffalo & Erie County Naval & Military Park applied to the
Department of the Navy for a decommissioned naval vessel. The Navy
agreed, and in 1977 donated the destroyer USS The Sullivans -
designated a National Historic Landmark by the Department of the
Interior in 1986 - as well as the Guided Missile Cruiser USS Little
Rock, to the City of Buffalo. .

The park opened to the public in 1979 and has continued to expand,
exposing new generations of visitors to America's proud military past. .

In 2008, the Naval Park created an outside exhibit area along with a
new museum building and gift shop. Since then, the park has obtained
artifacts related to all branches of the armed forces. The park's
collection today includes a Rotocycle helicopter, an Army M-41 tank, a
Marine armored personnel carrier, a "Huey" helicopter, an Air Force
F-101F Voodoo fighter jet, a PT boat, a Navy Fury jet and a P-39
Airacobra. .

But the biggest event in the park's history will come next month. .

On Saturday, Dec. 16, the new USS Little Rock will be officially
commissioned alongside its predecessor at Canalside. This will be the
first time in the 242-year history of the U.S. Navy that a new ship is
commissioned alongside her namesake, according to the USS Little Rock
LCS 9 Commissioning Committee. .

This is about more than adding a ship to America's Navy; it's an
unprecedented moment for Western New York. Add the Naval Park to the
hit list for tourists and potential conventions and events. .

The original USS Little Rock was in service from Aug. 27, 1944,
until her decommissioning in 1976. It is the only remaining Cleveland
class ship in existence. Many of her crew members still recall their
service fondly, including former Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus. He
was the longest to serve as leader of the Navy and Marine Corps since
World War I. .

During his tenure, the Navy went from building fewer than five ships
per year to having more than 70 ships under contract, an average of 14
ships per year. The new USS.

Little Rock must have been on his mind. .

"It takes a long time to rebuild a fleet. With the commitments of
the last eight years, we've turned the trend, and the size of the fleet
will reach 300 ships by 2019 and 308 by 2021. The ships we are building
now will determine fleet size for years to come," Mabus said in his
farewell speech at the Marine Corps Barracks in Washington, D.C., on
Jan. 6, 2017. .

"I am absolutely convinced that our Navy and Marine Corps are
positioned for a future that is as brilliant and as noble as its past."
.

That last quote sums up the profound reasoning for the Dec. 16 ceremony slated to take place at Canalside. .

"The mission of our committee is to pull together a first-class
event - something fitting of the historical significance of this
commissioning," said Maurice L. Naylon III, chairman of the
Commissioning Committee. "We also have the responsibility of raising
money to fund initiatives that will honor and preserve the legacy of
both ships that carry the name USS Little Rock." .

CopyrightC 2005-2017
Bee Publications Inc.
All Rights Reserved

Used with permission.
Bee Group Newspapers
Williamsville, New York

Posted: November 6, 2017

Future USS Little Rock to be
Commissioned in Buffalo, New York

SAN
DIEGO (NNS) -- Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer announced
October 18 the newest Freedom-variant littoral combat ship, PCU Little
Rock (LCS 9), will be commissioned during a ceremony Saturday, December
16 at Canalside Buffalo.

The future LCS 9, commanded by Cmdr. Todd Peters, is the tenth
littoral combat ship to enter the fleet and the fifth of the Freedom
variant design. It is the second warship named for the Arkansas state
capital and will be commissioned alongside its namesake ship, which
serves as a museum at the Buffalo and Erie County Naval and Military
Park.

In the summer of 2013, the keel of Little Rock was laid down. The
ship was christened and launched on July 18, 2015 during a ceremony at
Marinette Marine Corporation's shipyard in Marinette, Wisconsin.

The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is a class of Small Surface
Combatants with specific capabilities focused to defeat global
challenges in the near-show (littoral) environment. LCS is optimized
for flexibility in the littorals with mission reconfigurable
capability. Employing a System-of-Systems approach through a series of
modular mission packages, unmanned vehicles and an innovative hull
design, the LCS is designed to incrementally add combat capabilities
through its reconfigurable mission packages. LCS is a cost effective
solution to provide joint force access in the littorals, in an
environment of evolving access-denial threats and proliferation of
asymmetric weapons and strategies, particularly mines; small, fast,
highly armed boats operating in groups; and diesel submarines operating
in shallow water. LCS is designed to operate independently in
low-to-medium threat environments, and to fight and operate in
high-threat environments as part of a networked battle force which
includes larger, multi-mission surface combatants.

The LCS class consists of two variants, the Freedom variant and the
Independence variant, designed and built by two industry teams. The
Freedom variant team is led by Lockheed Martin (for the odd-numbered
hulls, e.g. LCS 1). The Independence variant team is led by Austal USA
(for LCS 6 and the subsequent even-numbered hulls).

After commissioning in Buffalo, she will make her way to homeport in Mayport, Florida.

Posted: October 31, 2017

New USS Little Rock Commissioning
set for Dec. 16 at Canalside

The
commissioning will be the first time in the Navy's 242-year history
that one of its ships is commissioned in view of the decommissioned
ship for which it is named, according to Maurice L. "Moe" Naylon III,
chairman of the local commissioning committee.

The
old USS Little Rock, a light cruiser that arrived here 40 years ago, is
one of the main attractions at the Buffalo & Erie County Naval and
Military Park.

"We are just
delighted that this commissioning is finally coming to fruition,"
Naylon said today. "We look forward to sharing this grand and historic
event with all of Buffalo and Western New York."

The
ship, one of the Navy's new Freedom Class littoral combat ships, will
arrive on Dec. 8 for a week-long celebration leading up to the
commissioning.

The commissioning
ceremony is set for the morning of Saturday, Dec. 16, and is expected
to attract several thousand spectators from the region and across the
country, Naylon said.

A number
of top Navy and government officials will be present along with Jane'e
Bonner, who is the ship's sponsor and from Alabama. She had christened
the ship on July 18, 2015, at the Fincantieri Marinette Marine Shipyard
in Marinette, Wis., where the new Little Rock and other littoral combat
ships are built.

Among the
features that make these ships special is that they move at high speeds
and are able to navigate in shallow waters near coastlines unlike the
Navy's bigger and slower warships.

Commissioning Set For The New
USS LITTLE ROCK LCS 9

Navy service nearing for future USS Little Rock
Commissioning set for December

The
U.S. Navy has taken possession of the shallow-water combat ship that
will become the USS Little Rock once commissioned near year's end.

The
$360 million ship will soon make its way from the Wisconsin shipyard
where it was built through the Great Lakes to Buffalo, N.Y., where it
will be formally inducted into the naval fleet near the convergence of
the Buffalo River and Lake Erie on Dec. 16, a Navy spokesman said.

The
future USS Little Rock will be the second Navy ship christened after
Arkansas' capital city. The first -- a Cleveland-class light cruiser
put into service in 1945 before transforming into a guided missile
cruiser a decade later -- is now a museum in Buffalo.

The December ceremony will be the first time in the Navy's history that a ship has been commissioned beside its namesake.

Ron
Maxwell, coordinator for the USS Little Rock Namesake Committee, said
the commissioning will be historic for both the Navy and Little Rock.

"Arkansas
has a proud history of stepping up to the plate; there's a lot of
patriots here," Maxwell, a Navy veteran, said. "This is a very
patriotic thing and an honor to have a ship named after your city."

The
future USS Little Rock, known as LCS-9, will be the Navy's 11th
littoral combat ship and the fifth of the Freedom variant developed by
a team led by Lockheed Martin. The others were built by an Austal
USA-led group. The U.S. Department of Defense has awarded contracts for
16 more littoral combat ships to be split by the two companies.

Small
by the Navy's standards (389 feet long and 57 feet wide), the class of
ships gives the Navy access to thousands of ports unreachable by other
ships in the fleet.

The
ship, which features a helicopter landing pad on its rear deck, can
exceed speeds of 45 knots, or 45 nautical miles per hour. It feeds 1.9
million gallons of water through its four jets every minute, fast
enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool in 20 seconds.

The
future USS Little Rock, which is expected to have a 30-year service
life, passed its acceptance trials on Lake Michigan in August, posting
the highest score of any Freedom-variant ship to date.

"We
are excited to welcome the future USS Little Rock to the Fleet," Capt.
Shawn Johnston, commander of LCS Squadron Two, said. "Successful
completion of this milestone is another important step to bring more
LCS to the Fleet. We look forward to completing the building phase of
Little Rock and moving on to the operational and deployment phases of
each subsequent LCS. Our ability to operate for extended periods of
time from forward operating stations will provide our Fleet commanders
more flexibility and posture overseas."

From
Buffalo, the ship will set sail for its home port in Mayport, Fla.,
before deploying to sea with a stock crew of 50 sailors, which can
double in size depending on the mission package.

Once
at sea, the ship, with "Little Rock" displayed on the hull, will be
many foreigners' first exposure to the United States, officials said.
The ship and its crew -- which has already visited Little Rock -- will
maintain a relationship and connection to the city throughout the
ship's life, officials said.

At
the commissioning ceremony, the Little Rock city officials will present
the crew with a gift from the city. The namesake committee also will
give the crew members gifts, Maxwell said. The committee is still
determining what the gifts will be, but it's searching for something
emblematic of Little Rock.

Officials
in Buffalo are planning a week-long celebration for the commissioning,
with invitations extended to government officials as high as the White
House.

Several dozen Arkansas officials and residents are expected to attend the festivities.

Once
commissioned, the local namesake committee will morph into another
standing body to maintain relations with the ship and support the
ship's crew. For example, the committee may decide to fund scholarships
for children of crew members, Maxwell said.

Former
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus is owed much of the thanks for the ship's
name. The former governor of Mississippi spent part of naval service
aboard the original USS Little Rock.

The
Navy accepted the future USS Little Rock (LCS-9) on the 60th
anniversary of the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School
by a group of black students known as the Little Rock Nine. Navy
officials said the acceptance date and hull number were coincidental.

Shipbuilders
began constructing the future USS Little Rock in 2012, but its delivery
and commissioning were delayed after some of the initial Freedom class
ships experienced mechanical failures and government watchdogs called
the littoral combat ship program into question.

In
mid-2015, the Navy issued three corrective action requests to the
Lockheed Martin team, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office
asked Congress last year in a report that it "consider not funding" the
littoral combat ships requested by the Defense Department in its 2017
budget.

However, Lockheed Martin
and the Navy say they have sorted out the ships' problems, and
congressional support for the program has remained strong, due in part
to the large number of shipbuilding jobs supported by the program.

(Information for this article was contributed by staff members of Bloomberg News.

Posted: October 8, 2017

"New USS Little Rock passes seaworthy test"

SEAWORTHY VIDEO

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COMMISSIONING NEWS VIDEO

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The Buffalo News - August 31, 2017

The
future USS Little Rock passed comprehensive seaworthy trials last week
on Lake Michigan, a necessary step before the ship can be brought to
Buffalo's harbor later this year to be commissioned alongside the
original USS Little Rock, which is permanently docked at Canalside.

The new USS Little Rock
will be the first Navy ship commissioned alongside its namesake
predecessor and the first Navy ship to be commissioned in Buffalo.

The five-day trials by
the U.S. Navy's Board of Inspection and Survey represent the last major
milestone before delivery of the littoral combat ship.

The new Little Rock will
be among the fastest ships in the Navy's fleet, will be able to
navigate closer to shorelines and take on illicit-trafficking
operations as well as counter-piracy operations. It will have a core
crew of 50.

Sea trials are
designed to test the ship's performance under a variety of operating
conditions. During the builder's trials, the industry team successfully
demonstrated reliability and performance improvements on the ship's
propulsion system. All future Freedom-variant Littoral Combat Ships
will incorporate these improvements.

The Lockheed
Martin-led team is now preparing Little Rock for acceptance trials in
the coming weeks, when the U.S. Navy's Board of Inspection and Survey
(INSURV) will conduct inspections and witness final demonstrations
before the ship is delivered to the Navy this year....

The team is on track to complete sea trials for LCS 9 and LCS 11 this year and deliver each ship shortly thereafter....

Mayport set to receive boost as part of big Littoral Combat Ship program changes

New engineering training ordered for class of Mayport-bound ships
By Rich Jones

Jacksonville, FL - Excitement is in the air as Naval Station Mayport
officially welcomes USS Milwaukee (LCS-5) and USS Detroit (LCS-7).

Mayport is going to become home for all of the Navy's Freedom variant
LCS's. Milwaukee and Detroit lead the way for Littoral Combat Ship
Squadron (LCSRON) Two.

"Not only great for our national security, which shows you the
importance of Northeast Florida, but also a tremendous impact on our
local economy with all the ships and planes and people", said retiring
US Representative Ander Crenshaw.

"The Littoral Combat Ship, the so-called ship of the future, all of
those on the east coast are going to be headquartered right here in
Mayport", Crenshaw said.

The Navy says Mayport will be home to 12 LCS, meaning more Sailors and
families coming to the First Coast. This comes at an important time for
the base, which has seen ship levels drop with the decommissioning of
Navy frigates.

LCS vessels were designed to be high-speed, shallow draft multi-mission
ships capable of operating independently or with a strike group. They
are designed to defeat growing littoral threats and provide access and
dominance in coastal waters. A fast, maneuverable and networked
surface-combatant, LCS's provide the required warfighting capabilities
and operational flexibility to execute focused missions such as surface
warfare, mine warfare and anti-submarine warfare.

USS Milwaukee was commissioned Nov. 21, 2015 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Since arriving in Mayport last February, the ship's crew has
successfully completed full-ship shock trials and is currently
undergoing planned maintenance availability at BAE Shipyard.

USS Detroit was commissioned Oct. 22, 2016 in Detroit, Michigan. On
Nov. 23, the ship arrived at Mayport and has been conducting combat
system ship qualification testing (CSSQT).

Over the next year three more ships, which have yet to be commissioned,
will call Naval Station Mayport home: USS Little Rock (LCS-9), USS
Sioux City (LCS-11) and USS Wichita (LCS-13).

Six Sailors from littoral
combat ship (LCS) Crew 109 joined members of the USS Little Rock
Association at the museum ship USS Little Rock (CL 92/CLG 4) in
Buffalo, N.Y., to perform restoration on the decommissioned ship prior
to the start of the summer tourist season.For 24 years, former Sailors
who served aboard the Cleveland-class light cruiser reunite annually to
restore and maintain the ship while sharing sea stories and preserving
the ship's history. The original Little Rock was
commissioned in 1945, and was decommissioned in 1976. The ship
was converted to a museum and relocated to the Buffalo and Erie County
Naval and Military Park 1980. She is the last
remaining Cleveland-class light cruiser. Sailors from LCS Crew 109, the
Warhawgs, traveled from their homeport in Mayport, Fla. to assist in
the annual restoration project. Crew 109 is made up of a core
crew of 50 Sailors and serves as the commissioning crew for USS Little
Rock (LCS 9). The newest Little Rock will be the fifth
Freedom-class littoral combat ship, and is scheduled to be commissioned
in Buffalo later this year. "This year has turned out
to be a record-setter with respect to the number of participants in the
USS Little Rock Association's annual work party," said Art Tilley, a
former Missile Technician 2nd Class who served aboard Little Rock from
1962-1963. "The additional six active-duty
Navy personnel from LCS Crew 109 enabled us to work on more than double
the number of projects, including installing weather deck canvas,
prepping and painting significant portions of the Missile House
exterior and repositioning several exterior deck drains," said
Tilley. "It goes without saying that this will be a work party
which will be remembered by the 'old' crew as unquestionably the most
successful working party ever, thanks to the fantastic efforts and the
much appreciated can-do attitude of our Crew 109 sailors.""This has been a great
opportunity for Sailors from the namesake Little Rock and the future
LCS-9 to get together and not only build personal relationships but
also preserve the history of the ship as well," said Cmdr. Paul
Burkhart, commanding officer of the future Little Rock. When the future Little Rock is
commissioned, it will mark the first time a U.S. Navy ship is
commissioned alongside her decommissioned namesake. This bridging
of generations was evident as Sailors from the two ships worked
together."The opportunity to see their
heritage being passed down and perpetuating the legacy from the former
crew to the new crew has been a treat for the staff here at the Buffalo
Naval," said retired Aviation Hydraulic Structural Mechanic John
Branning, a maintenance supervisor for the Buffalo Naval Park."Not to mention the sheer
amount of painting and general material condition upkeep that the two
groups have accomplished really helps us," Branning added. "Working
parties like these are truly invaluable and having actual active-duty
Sailors who have damage control and maintenance training really helps
bring in updated view points and technological knowledge that some of
us Old Guard are lacking.""Meeting and working alongside
other Little Rock Sailors was an experience within itself," said
Engineman 2nd Class Kyler Ayscue from Crew 109. "Hearing their stories and
experiences, it's amazing how, even after 40 years or more, our stories
can still relate."In addition to assisting with
the restoration and maintenance of the museum ship, LCS Crew 109
Sailors took advantage of their time in Buffalo visiting patients at
the Buffalo VA Medical Center and attending a Buffalo Bisons' baseball
game.

Posted in the U.S. Naval Station - Mayport
"Mirror"
Wed, 06/08/2016 - 2:52pm

New USS Little Rock to be
commissioned in Buffalo
By Chris Caya - April 26, 2016

An historic event is in the
works for the USS. Little Rock at the Buffalo & Erie County Naval
& Military Park.

The Navy's new USS. Little Rock LCS 9 is going to be
commissioned in Buffalo's Inner Harbor. Maurice Naylon, chairman of the
local commissioning committee, says it's an historic event.

"Ships are commissioned throughout the Navy. But there's
never been a ship commissioned... in the 240 year history of the Navy -
right beside its namesake. And that's going to happen when the new
U.S.S. Little Rock arrives in our port to be commissioned right beside
its namesake," Naylon said.

The new ship's Commander, Paul Burkhart, is a Rochester
native. Burkhart says no date has been set yet, but he says the new
Little Rock will be in Buffalo for a week-long commissioning
celebration.

A new combat
vessel will officially join the Navy's fleet during ceremonies on the
city's waterfront later this year or early next year.

The new USS Little Rock, a Littoral Combat Ship,
will be commissioned at Canalside next to the decommissioned ship of
the same name, the first time an event will have happened with the
vessels in such proximity in the Navy's history.

The new Little Rock will enter active duty next
to the former cruiser, now a floating museum in the Buffalo & Erie
County Naval and Military Park. The event also will mark the first time
in the city's modern history that a ship entered the Navy's fleet here.

And the man in charge of the ship will be
Commander Paul Burkhart, who graduated from high school outside
Rochester in 1985.

Littoral Combat Ships get their name because they
operate in waters close to shore.

The new Little Rock will be 378 feet long and 56
feet wide and will weigh about 3,000 tons.

The ship will be able to undertake three types of
combat missions: anti-submarine, anti-mine and surface warfare.

Because of its abilities, the ship also will be
well suited to take on illicit-trafficking operations in places like
the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, as well as counter-piracy operations
like around the Horn of Africa, Burkhart said.

The ship will have a helicopter launch pad, a
ramp for small boats and will have new water jet-propulsion.

A core crew of 50 will operate the ship, plus 20
to 23 more sailors depending on the mission-specific equipment brought
aboard. That means the total size of the crew will peak at fewer than
100, far fewer than the 250 to 350 sailors aboard a destroyer, Burkhart
said.

"It takes fewer people because it's more
automated," the graduate of Churchville-Chili High School said. In his
30-plus year career in the Navy, this will be Burkhart's 10th ship.

He enlisted in the Navy in Buffalo in 1984,
before his senior year in high school. He eventually took part in an
enlisted commissioning program, which allowed him to rise through the
ranks as an officer.

The new Little Rock, named after the capital of
Arkansas as was its namesake, will be the ninth ship of the LCS class.
It was christened last July 18 at Marinette Marine Corp.'s shipyard in
Marinette, Wis., with an estimated cost of $360 million. There are two
variants within the LCS class - the Freedom variant, which has a
conventional hull; and the Independence variant, which is a trimaran,
or multi-hull boat. The Little Rock is a Freedom variant.

Once the ship is commissioned, it will undergo
several months of tests of its combat systems and then mission-specific
testing before it is ready to be deployed.

The decommissioned Little Rock was put into
service as a light cruiser in 1945 and decommissioned in 1949. It was
recommissioned as a guided missile cruiser in 1960 and decommissioned
in 1976. It opened to the public in the naval park in 1979.

When the new Little Rock arrives in Buffalo from
the Menominee River north of Green Bay for its commissioning event at
Canalside, members of the public will be able to tour the ship as part
of weeklong festivities. A date for the event has not been finalized.

WASHINGTON - The US Navy's fight to buy 52 variants of its littoral
combat ship (LCS) from two shipbuilders may have taken a fatal blow
this week after the secretary of defense directed the service to cap
its buy at 40 ships and pick only one supplier. The directive also
orders the Navy to buy only one ship annually over the next four years,
down from three per year.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter, in a Dec. 14 memo to Navy Secretary Ray
Mabus, told the Navy to "reduce the planned LCS/FF procurement from 52
to 40, creating a 1-1-1-1-2 profile, for eight fewer ships in the FYDP,
and then downselect to one variant by FY 2019." FF is a Navy
designation for frigate. Beginning with LCS 33, the Navy is planning to
build a more heavily-armed LCS variant with the FF designation, the
result of a 2014 directive from then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to
produce a more powerful ship. The "1-1-1-1-2" profile would provide for
one ship each year in 2017-2020 and two ships in 2021, the end of the
current future years defense plan (FYDP).

Navy to make history when it commissions new USS Little Rock next to its namesake at Canalside

By Lou Michel - BuffaloNews Staff Reporter
August 5, 2015

Two pages of history will be written when a sleek new combat vessel
cruises into Canalside and is commissioned as the USS Little Rock
beside its namesake.

The commissioning will mark the first time in modern Buffalo history a
ship has been accepted into the U.S. Navy’s fleet here, and the first
time in Navy history that a ship has been commissioned beside a
decommissioned ship bearing the same name, according to officials at
the Buffalo & Erie County Naval and Military Park.

And though the commissioning isn’t expected to happen until December
2016 or May 2017, depending on the weather in the Great Lakes and on
when the new USS Little Rock completes its trial runs in Lake Michigan,
park officials say it will mark a proud day for Buffalo and the region.

“As the time gets closer, it will give us an opportunity to showcase a
little bit of the history of the Navy and its ships, and we’ll also be
able to showcase the waterfront and really show off Buffalo,” said John
M. Branning, superintendent of ships at the park.

The new USS Little Rock, built in Marinette, Wis., near Green Bay, got
its name after crew members from the old USS Little Rock persuaded
Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus to assign the name to one of the Navy’s
newest warships.

The new Little Rock is an LCS, or Littoral Combat Ship, which means it
will operate in waters close to shore. The ships have a helicopter
launch pad, a ramp for small boats, and can be used by small assault
forces.

“LCS is designed to satisfy the urgent requirement for shallow draft
vessels to operate in the littoral (coastal waters) to counter growing
potential ‘asymmetric’ threats of coastal mines, quiet diesel
submarines and the potential to carry explosives and terrorists on
small, fast, armed boats," according to Navaltechnology.com.

It wasn’t exactly a hard sell to get Mabus on board with naming the new
ship the Little Rock. He served as a junior officer on the USS Little
Rock in 1971 and 1972 and is a long-standing member of the USS Little
Rock Association, which gathered in Buffalo about two weeks ago for its
annual reunion. Mabus was among the more than 200 former shipmates who
attended.

The name of the original Little Rock and the new one, of course, pay tribute to Arkansas’ capital city.

Initially Mabus kept association members guessing on whether he would keep the old ship’s name alive.

“When we presented this question regarding the naming of the ship to
Secretary Mabus, he appeared to be skeptical, pointing out quite
eloquently that there is a lot of political pressure in naming a ship.
He genuinely left us with a question of whether it would happen,” said
Art Tilley, the association’s webmaster and a guided missile technician
on the ship in 1962 and 1963.

“I’m ecstatic, to say the least,” he added. “This preserves the legacy
of those who previously served on Little Rock.”

The original USS Little Rock began its service as a light cruiser in
1945, when World War II was coming to an end. In 1949, it was
decommissioned, but it was recommissioned in 1960 as a guided missile
cruiser, patrolling the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean and Mediterranean
seas, before it was permanently taken out of service in 1976 and
brought to Buffalo.

So what officially happens at a commissioning?

Unlike the christening of a ship, when a bottle of champagne is broken
on the bow and the vessel is launched into the water for the first
time, a naval commissioning represents the start of the ship’s career.

“When the ship is commissioned, it is actually being brought into the
United States Navy,” Branning said. “It’s when the Navy and its crew
take charge of it. The commanding officer takes possession and his
first order to the crew will be ‘bring the ship to life.’ Then the crew
runs aboard.”

It is expected that many members of the USS Little Rock Association will attend the commissioning.

“Usually things like this do not happen in the lifetime of living
ex-crew members,” Tilley said. “Come hell or high water, I’m planning
to be there. It’s the culmination of a dream.”

LITTLE
ROCK is Christened at Marinette Marine

18 Jul 2015

An official invitation to the Christening Ceremony

An hour before the start of the Christening Ceremony it was
beginning to look as if the weather wouldn't cooperate.
False alarm! The weather was perfect.

Two nice
views of Marinette Marine. The LITTLE ROCK
is furthest from the camera... on the launching ways.The two ships in the water are both Freedom Class
ships, most likely
DETROIT and MILWAUKEE.

LITTLE ROCK in full dress shortly before
launching.

Looking up the access
ramp to the spot
LITTLE ROCK's sponsor Ms. Janee Bonnerwhere the champagne bottle is to be
broken
breaks
the "sacrificial" champagne
bottle

History
/ Purpose: Ceremony
involves placing or welding one or more items into or under the mast of
a ship, and is thought to bring good luck. Origins in the naval
histories of the Vikings, Greeks and Romans .

Completing the installation of Little Rock's (LCS 9) main mast on April
23, 2015 marking the latest milestone
in the ship's completion schedule. The 5,070-pound mast, standing
27’-10” tall, supports the ship's suite of
communication, navigation, and combat systems antennas and radars.

Photos and text are from the
Spring 2015 issue of "The Beacon" a publication of Marinette Marine Corporation

Navy
continues funding for Marinette Marine combat ships

By
Ted
Miller
April 1, 2015

The U.S. Navy will
continue providing funds for
building Littoral Combat Ships at Marinette Marine.

The company
announced the Navy modified its contract
for one fully-funded LCS worth $362 million, along
with a $79 million advance payment on a second ship.
The award includes an option for an additional ship in fiscal year
2016.

They will be
the 11th and 12th Freedom-class Littoral
Combat Ships.

Lockheed
Martin’s vice president of Littoral Ship
Systems, Joe North, issued this statement: “We are
proud to continue this partnership with the Navy in
building the advanced Freedom-variant littoral combat
ship, and we thank the Navy for maintaining the cost
and schedule for the block buy.

“Thousands of
people across the country contribute to
this important program and will continue to do so as
we transition to the new frigate upgrade in the
coming years.”

The original
Marinette Marine-built LCS, the USS
Freedom, completed a successful deployment in
Southeast Asia. Another, the USS Fort Worth, is on a
deployment with the U.S. 7th Fleet until 2016.

Delivery of
the USS Milwaukee to the Navy and the
christening and launch of the USS Little Rock are
both planned to happen this summer.

LITTLE
ROCK is moved out of
construction building

21 Mar 2015

LITTLE ROCK LCS 9 is moved from the Hull Block Erection
Building #10

LITTLE ROCK - LCS 9 is moved to her new waterfront
location on the
Menominee River onSelf Propelled Modular
Transporters (SPMT's). At this point she weighs over 7 million
pounds!

LITTLE ROCK LCS 9 positioned on the launching ways.
Note that the ship's mast has not yet been installed.

Christening, Launching, and Commissioning
of
U.S. Navy Ships

01 Feb
2015 by John C. Reilly

Head,
Ships History Branch

Christening
and Launching

“In the name of the United States I christen thee
________________," proclaims the sponsor while she shatters the
ceremonial bottle of champagne against the gleaming bow of a new ship
towering above her. As if the sponsor's very words have injected a
spark of life, the ship begins to move slowly from the security of the
building way to the water environment where she will play her destined
role for the defense of the United States.

When a woman accepts the Secretary of the Navy's
invitation to sponsor a new ship, she has agreed to stand as the
central figure in an event with a heritage reaching backward into the
dim recesses of recorded history.

The first description we have of an American warship
christening is that of Constitution, famous "Old Ironsides,"
at Boston, 21 October 1797. Her sponsor, Captain James Sever, USN,
stood on the weather deck at the bow. "At fifteen minutes after twelve
she commenced a movement into the water with such steadiness, majesty
and exactness as to fill every heart with sensations of joy and
delight." As Constitution ran out, Captain Sever broke a
bottle of fine old Madeira over the heel of the bowsprit.

The first identified woman sponsor was Miss Lavinia
Fanning Watson, daughter of a prominent Philadelphian. She broke a
bottle of wine and water over the bow of
sloop-of-war Germantown at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on 22
August 1846.

The actual physical process of launching a new ship from
her building site to the water involves three principal methods.
Oldest, most familiar, and most widely used is the "end-on" launch in
which the vessel slides, usually stern first, down an inclined shipway.
The "side launch," whereby the ship enters the water broadside, came
into nineteenth-century use on inland waters, rivers, and lakes, and
was given major impetus by the World War II building program. Another
method involves ships built in basins or graving docks. When ready,
ships constructed in this manner are floated by admitting water into
the dock.Fitting
Out and Commissioning

Christening and launching are the inseparable elements
which endow a ship hull with her identity. Yet, just as many
developmental milestones must be passed before one takes his place in
society, so too must the newly-launched vessel pass such milestones
before she is completed and considered ready to be designated a
commissioned ship of the United States Navy. The engineering plant,
weapon and electronic systems, galley, and multitudinous other
equipment required to transform the new hull into an operating and
habitable warship are installed and tested. The prospective commanding
officer, ship's officers, the petty officers, and seamen who will form
the crew report for training and intensive familiarization with their
new ship. Crew and ship must function in total unison if full potential
and maximum effectiveness are to be realized.

Prior to commissioning, the new ship undergoes sea trials
during which deficiencies needing correction are uncovered. The
preparation and readiness time between christening-launching and
commissioning may be as much as three years for a nuclear-powered
aircraft carrier to as brief as twenty days for a World War II landing
ship. Monitor, of Civil War fame, was commissioned less than three
weeks after launch.

Commissioning in the early United States Navy under sail
was attended by no ceremony. An officer designated to command a new
ship received orders similar to those issued to Captain Thomas Truxtun
in 1798:

“Sir, I have it in command from the president of the
United States, to direct you to repair with all due speed on board the
ship Constellation lying at Baltimore. It is required that no
Time be lost in carrying the Ship into deep water, taking on board her
Cannon, Ammunition, Water, Provisions & Stores of every kind
completing what work is yet to be done shipping her Complement of
Seamen and Marines, and preparing her in every respect for Sea . . . It
is the President's express Orders, that you employ the most vigorous
Exertions, to accomplish these several Objects and to put your Ship as
speedily as possible in a situation to sail at the shortest notice.”Commissionings were not public affairs and, unlike
christening-launching ceremonies, no accounts of them are to be found
in contemporary newspapers. The first specific references to
commissioning located in naval records is a letter of 6 November 1863
from Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles to all navy yards and
stations. The Secretary directed: "Hereafter the commandants of navy
yards and stations will inform the Department, by special report of the
date when each vessel preparing for sea service at their respective
commands, is placed in commission."

Subsequently, various editions of Navy Regulations
mentioned the act of putting a ship in commission, but details of a
commissioning ceremony were not prescribed. Through custom and usage,
however, a fairly standard practice emerged, the essentials of which
are outlined in current Navy Regulations.

Officers and crew members of the new ship are assembled on
the quarterdeck or other suitable area. Formal transfer of the ship to
the prospective commanding officer is done by the Naval District
Commandant or his representative. The transferring officer reads the
commissioning directive, the national anthem is played, the ensign is
hoisted, and commissioning pennant broken. The prospective commanding
officer reads his orders, assumes command, and the first watch is set.

In recent years, commissioning ceremonies have come to be
public occasions more than heretofore had been the practice. Guests,
including the ship's sponsor, are frequently invited to attend, and a
prominent individual may deliver a commissioning address.

Whether for a massive nuclear aircraft carrier, destroyer,
submarine, or amphibious type, the brief but impressive commissioning
ceremony completes the cycle from christening and launching to full
status as a ship of the United States Navy. Now, regardless of size and
mission, the vessel and her crew stand ready to take their place in
America's historic heritage of the sea.

The foregoing is excerpted from a somewhat lengthier
article written by the late John C. Reilly, Head, Ships History Branch,
Naval History and Heritage Command, Washington Navy Yard, Washington,
DC.

LCS
Now Officially Called A
Frigate
15 Jan 2015

WASHINGTON — Since its inception in 2001, the US Navy's
Littoral Combat
Ship program has been described as needed to replace the fleet's
frigates, minesweepers and patrol ships. But the ship's place in the
line of battle continues to be debated. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus thinks
one of the reasons the ship is misunderstood is the nontraditional LCS
designator. He directed an
effort to find a more traditional and appropriate designation for the
LCS and several other recent ship types, such as the Joint High Speed
Vessel (JHSV), the Mobile Landing Platform (MLP) and the Afloat Forward
Staging Base (AFSB).

The first of the types to be redesignated is the LCS. "If
it's like a
frigate, why don't we call it a frigate?" he said Thursday morning to a
roomful of surface warfare sailors at the Surface Navy Association's
annual symposium just outside Washington. "We are going to change the
hull designation of the LCS class ships to FF," Mabus said, citing the
traditional hull designation for frigates.
"It will still be the same ship, the same program of record, just with
an appropriate and traditional name."

Mabus has long been irked by the habit in recent years of
applying
program-like designations to ships, and LCS is an example. In the
Navy's designation system, the first letter sometimes is the key to the
overall role of the ship, and "L-class" ships are widely considered to
be those involved in carrying Marines and their equipment for an
amphibious assault. LCS is the sole exception — a ship the Navy counts
as a surface combatant, not an amphibious lift ship.

"When I hear L, I think amphib," Mabus said. "And it's not
an amphib.
And I have to spend a good deal of my time explaining what littoral
is." Re-designating the ships as FF puts the ship squarely back in the
surface combatant category, and is appropriate, since the Pentagon
direction in developing the modified LCS was to make it more
"frigate-like."

Navy sources said it was intended to designate only the
modified LCS as
frigates, but many of the upgrades intended for those ships are to be
back-fitted into earlier LCS hulls, blending the types. So in the end,
the decision was made to make the change to the entire class. Navy
sources said a decision on what hull numbers the ships will carry has
yet to be made. There are several possibilities — if the ships pick up
with the frigate series, the next number available is FF 1099. The
fleet's last guided-missile frigates (FFGs) will be decommissioned in
September, and the next number in that sequence is FFG 62. But unlike
the Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates being phased out, the LCS
doesn't carry an area air-defense missile such as the Standard missile
— the basis for the "G" — so the FFG series isn't entirely appropriate.

The Navy also could decide not to change the hull numbers
but simply
change the designator — something that was done in the late 1970s when
new Aegis guided-missile destroyers were redesignated as cruisers
without changing the numbers. Mabus said he would announce additional
ship changes in coming weeks.By
Christopher P.
Cavas, DefenseNews (a
Gannett Company)

Changes to Littoral Ships
16 Dec 2014

Changes to littoral ships to increase armor, weapons
systems.

Workers are still building Mayport’s first expected littoral combat
ship, the future USS Little Rock, but Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel
ordered large-scale changes to the program Thursday. Hagel announced in
February that the government would freeze the last 20 of the 52 planned
ships while the Navy searched for answers to questions about the ship’s
firepower and survivability. “The Navy is doing a review of the LCS,
because there were some questions in terms of threats and vulnerability
and that sort of thing and I think they recognize that,” Hagel told the
Times-Union in July. “Like anything that’s new, there will be some
modifications and they’ll find things that they can do better.”

Hagel said Thursday (Dec 16, 2014) the orders for the last 20 ships
would begin in 2019, albeit with significant upgrades to a still
unidentified version of the ship. The upgrades are expected to cost $65
to $75 million per ship, more than doubling the original per-ship costs
of $220 million to over $500 million. What that means for Mayport’s
program remains unknown. “Right now, we’re just focusing on our program
here at Mayport and receiving the USS Little Rock in 2016,” said base
spokesman William Townsend.

Hagel raised the possibility early this year that an entirely new
design would be considered for the remaining 20 ships. Instead, Hagel
and the Navy decided to go with an upgraded version of one or both of
the current designs. Currently, Mayport is slated to only receive ships
of the Lockheed-Martin Freedom-Class design, while Austal and General
Dynamics build the Independence-Class variant that will make up a
portion of Naval Station San Diego’s fleet.

An August report by the Congressional Research Service detailed the
myriad concerns over the program. “The LCS program has been
controversial due to past cost growth, design and construction issues
with the lead ships built to each design, concerns over the ships’
survivability (i.e., ability to withstand battle damage), and concerns
over whether the ships are sufficiently armed and would be able to
perform their stated missions effectively,” according to the report.

Obviously, at least some of those concerns were legitimate. The
numerous upgrades to the ships nearly all focus on increasing the
ship’s own firepower and it’s ability to avoid, or at least survive,
that of the enemy. Added armor will help shore-up the ship’s aluminum
skin. The newly introduced SeaRAM, or rolling airframe missile,
currently in-use with the Independence-class of ships, will be added to
all of the final 20 ships.

The SeaRAM is a radar and optics-guided remote missile system that can
destroy close-in targets in the air and on the water’s surface. A pair
of 25mm guns, in addition to the ship’s main 57mm gun, will also added.
Offensively, a surface-to-surface missile system with a range of about
70 miles will give the ship some of the punch it has been accused of
lacking.

Designated as the East Coast hub for the new ships, Mayport is
currently scheduled to receive at least six of the ships — along with
900 sailors — in the coming years.

Times-Union / Jacksonville, FL

Mayport, Florida

13 Nov 2014

Today the U.S. Naval Station Mayport newspaper
the "Mirror" ran an article by Paige Gnann the Mirror editor entitled:

"Mayport
Moves Closer To Being LCS Hub On East Coast"

Here are some excerpts from the article:

The landscape of Naval Station
Mayport’s basin is quickly changing, and establishment of Commander
Littoral Combat Ship Squadron Two (LCSRON Two) is further emphasizing
the steady growth of the base. . . . .

“If you look at Mayport 20
years ago… Mayport had a lot of frigates,” said Rear Adm. Pete
Gumataotao, Commander, Naval Surface Force Atlantic. “Now we’re looking
at the [frigates] starting sundown. It’s the turning of the guard, of
the watch.”. . . . .

“The LCS is here for a specific
mission …that is very diverse, very dynamic, very fast moving and very
challenging in an anti-axis area denial environment,” Gumataotao said. . . . . .

With the establishment of
LCSRON Two, six Freedom Class ships will be stationed at Naval Station
Mayport within the next four years. These ships include USS
Little Rock (LCS 9), USS Sioux City (LCS 11), USS Wichita (LCS 13), USS
Billings (LCS 15), USS Indianapolis (LCS 17), and (LCS 19), ship name
to be determined. . . . . .

Construction is currently
underway for a two-story building with a reinforced concrete
foundation, masonry walls and a pitched standing seam metal roof. The
building will serve as a logistics support facility for the Littoral
Combat Ship Squadron and other organizations which support the LCS.

Oct 2014 - Marinette Marine Corporation photo

The new USS Little Rock LCS 9
takes shape at Marinette
Marine Corporation.
This photo shows the new LITTLE ROCK under construction atMarinette
Marine Corporation in Marinette, Wisconsin in October 2014.

The LCS employs automation to achieve a reduced-sized core crew (i.e.,
sea frame crew). The program’s aim was to achieve a core crew of
40 sailors, although the Navy has now decided to increase that number
to about 50. Another 38 or so additional sailors are to operate
the ship’s embarked aircraft (about 23 sailors) and its embarked
mission package (about 15 sailors in the case of the MCM package),
which would make for a total crew of about 88 sailors (for an LCS
equipped with an MCM mission package), compared to more than 200 for
the Navy’s frigates and about 300 (or more) for the Navy’s current
cruisers and destroyers.

“3-2-1” Plan

The Navy plans to maintain three LCS crews for each two LCSs, and to
keep one of those two LCSs continuously underway—a plan Navy officials
refer to as “3-2-1.” Under the 3-2-1 plan, LCSs are to be
deployed for 16 months at a time, and crews are to rotate on and off
deployed ships at 4-month intervals. The 3-2-1 plan will permit the
Navy to maintain a greater percentage of the LCS force in deployed
status at any given time than would be possible under the traditional
approach of maintaining one crew for each LCS and deploying LCSs for
six to eight months at a time. The Navy plans to forward-station up to
four LCSs in the Western Pacific at Singapore, and up to eight LCSs in
the Persian Gulf at Bahrain.

The Littoral Combat Ship has come under light fire from
Congress
because they worry especially about findings by operational testers
that the ships cannot survive a firefight. Norman Friedman, a
consultant at Gryphon Technologies with more than 30 military books to
his name, argues in the following piece that critics need to consider
that “change is at the core” of the LCS design, marking a welcome
change in naval design. He believes LCS marks “the most fundamental
change in warship design” in decades. Friedman compares the
just-launched LCS ship USS Little Rock with the history of its
predecessor, a light cruiser built near the end of World War II,
mothballed a few years later and later rebuilt as a guided missile
cruiser at considerable cost. Before critics dismiss Friedman’s
argument, bear in mind that his book, “The Fifty-Year War:
Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War,” won the Royal United Services
Institute’s Westminster Prize in 2001. The man knows his history, as
well as the capabilities of the US Navy. Read on. The Editor.Warships are built to last a long time, so when they are
laid down they
are in essence bets on the future. But legendary baseball great and
sometime philosopher Yogi Berra had it right, “It’s tough making
predictions… especially about the future!” The increasing cost of
modern warships makes it even more important that these platforms are
capable of changing as threats evolve or new breakthroughs in warfare
emerge.Lost in all the discussions and debate swirling around the
design,
engineering, construction, and introduction of the Navy’s Littoral
Combat Ship (LCS) is the most fundamental change in warship design
since the introduction of the Vertical Launching System or the AEGIS
Weapon System decades ago, and that is the concept of modularity. One
of the most important characteristics of the LCS program is its
inherent modularity and how that will facilitate affordable and timely
modernization of the LCS ships throughout its expected 30-year service
life. As is often the case in these technical debates, a look at
history is helpful in understanding and placing modularity into a
21st-Century context.The history of the World War II-era light cruiser the USS
Little Rock
(CL-92) showed how right Yogi was; her life was full of operational and
technical surprises. She was laid down in 1943 as one of a large number
of light cruisers that were just showing how effective they could be in
combat versus Japanese cruisers in murderous night gun battles in the
Solomon Islands. By the time she was completed in June 1945, her
mission had changed, and the same cruisers were now wanted primarily to
protect aircraft carriers, the fleet's main striking arm. The war
ended, however, before Little Rock could see actual combat, and the
world’s geo-strategic situation soon changed dramatically.Amid the postwar political disorder, it mattered a great
deal that the
United States could deploy powerful cruisers. Little Rock spent the
early postwar years patrolling the Caribbean and Mediterranean Seas –
regions where the new Cold War was brewing. By 1949, however, money for
defense was short and many cruisers like Little Rock had to be laid up.
In 1943, very few observers could have imagined a nuclear world in
which the U.S. Navy’s main priorities would be strike carriers and
anti-submarine warfare, while general-purpose gunships like cruisers
would no longer be essential.The real surprise, however was that Little Rock was still
valuable –
because she was large enough to adapt to undertake new missions and to
accommodate new technology. The new jets of the 1950s out-classed the
shipboard anti-aircraft guns that had been so useful against kamikaze
attacks in 1945, so the Navy led in the development of the first
generation of ship-to-air guided missiles. It took a big ship to
accommodate these new weapons, and in its inventory of war-built
cruisers the Navy had exactly the right ships for this new mission.Removed from “mothballs” in 1957, after three years of
shipyard work
and hundreds of millions of dollars in upgrades, Little Rock was
re-commissioned in June 1960, as one of the first guided missile
cruisers (CLG/CG-4) in the Fleet. Not only did she carry missiles, she
was also large enough to be outfitted as a fleet flagship. Both the
missiles and the flagship capacity made her extremely useful in the new
Cold War.Little Rock returned to the Mediterranean as flagship of
the Sixth
Fleet, the most powerful Navy flotilla in that turbulent arena. As
such, she was present when war erupted in the Middle East in 1967.
After the Israelis inadvertently attacked the Navy surveillance ship
USS Liberty, Little Rock provided medical aid and other emergency
assistance to the stricken U.S. warship. As a command ship, she served
as the hub of NATO forces in the Eastern Mediterranean. Besides
Mediterranean operations, in 1961 Little Rock steamed off Santo Domingo
to provide command and control capabilities for U.S. forces trying to
stabilize that country after dictator Rafael Trujillo was assassinated.
The crises may have changed, but the United States is still vitally
interested today in both of those regions in which the original Little
Rock once steamed. Little Rock was decommissioned in 1976, after two
separate naval lives and providing valuable service to the nation.In June 2013, the keel of a new USS Little Rock was laid.
The latest
incarnation is the Navy’s ninth Littoral Combat Ship (LCS-9), and her
design reflects the great lesson of her predecessor's life; ships last,
but the world and missions can change quickly. The first Little Rock
was never conceived to be re-built with entirely new weapons and
electronics for new types of missions; no one could have imagined what
those might be in 1943. The ship was worth re-building because she was
large enough, fast enough and had a great deal of hull and machinery
life still left in her. The second, latest iteration of Little Rock, on
the other hand, is a very different proposition already. Change is at
the core of her design. LCS-9 is conceived from the keel up to carry
weapons and sensors that would be installed by placing standard
shipping containers on board and connecting them to a “plug-and-fight”
combat system.Right now, the mission options are what might be expected
for the
littoral arena: anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, and mine
countermeasures. To support those options, the new Little Rock can
carry helicopters – manned and unmanned – and she can launch unmanned
surface and underwater craft. She is designed to connect not only with
craft she may launch, but also with other off-board sensors and
systems. Both the unmanned vehicles and the off-board systems will
undoubtedly become more and more important over her lifetime. We don't
know exactly what new missions she may be called upon to perform at a
future date, but we do know that adapting to changing missions cannot
take three years of shipyard work and hundreds of millions of dollars
before she is ready to confront those changing operational demands.As the new Little Rock is designed and built, the Navy
remembered the
lesson of the past: change is inevitable, and the service must build
ships that can change as needed. Accordingly, the new Little Rock will
be able to swap in-and-out tailored mission packages quickly – on the
order of days if not hours—vice months or years.The other lesson of the two Little Rocks is that the sea
does not
change. There is a reason the cruiser Little Rock spent years in the
Mediterranean in both of her incarnations, and a reason she also spent
time in the Caribbean. The sea is still the main way in which the
United States connects with the rest of the world – and in a globalized
world, we cannot lose that intimate contact. It is the primary way in
which the United States supports its friends and Allies abroad, because
only by sea can we move masses of material, including airplanes.The new Little Rock is a littoral combat ship because more
and more of
the action at sea is likely to be in the littorals – that strip of land
influenced by what happens offshore, and the strip offshore influenced
by what happens ashore. That means mine warfare, anti-ship missiles and
diesel-electric submarines – operational problems the containerized,
modular LCS systems are intended to surmount.If the modularity concept is so important, why then have
the LCS
mission modules taken so long to develop and field? The short answer
would seem to be that the overall LCS program was uncertain until the
decision was ultimately made to pursue the 20-ship contract. Why press
ahead on mission packages when the basic hull itself and the need for
45-knot speed were in question?It would appear that the program is now at the point where
the Navy can
place increased focus and resources on modular mission packages. If
successful, these packages will be available to support matter-of-fact
upgrades, as well as respond to unforeseen advances in technology, for
Little Rock (LCS -9) and her sister ships. In short, modularity is a
terrific idea and – apart from aircraft carriers, which are inherently
modular – the LCS is the only modular ship we have. We need to get it
right. Modularity is the future.In many ways Yogi Berra was right, predicting the future
is tough. But
Little Rock LCS-9 and her sisters will have the flexibility to respond
to — if not anticipate — unforeseen change and take on new
missions that we can only dimly forecast today.Norman Friedman is an analyst in Gryphon Technologies’
TeamBlue
National Security Programs. His recent naval works include
“Network-Centric Warfare: How Navies Learned to Fight Smarter in Three
World Wars;” “Seapower as Strategy; Terrorism, Afghanistan, and
America’s New Way of War;” Naval Firepower; and his two-volume
histories of Royal Navy cruisers and destroyers. He also wrote five
editions of the encyclopedic “Naval Institute Guide to World Naval
Weapon Systems.” He is not consulting for either the Navy program
office overseeing LCS or for the companies building the ships.Breaking Defense

MARINETTE, WIS. The Navy has celebrated the keel
laying of the future USS Little Rock.

The traditional ceremony took place Thursday at the Marinette Marine
shipyard in Wisconsin, where the Littoral Combat Ship is under
construction.

During the ceremony, ship sponsor Janee Bonner authenticated the keel
by having her signature welded into it.

The keel is usually the first part of a ship's hull to be constructed.
Laying the keel is often marked with a ceremonial event.

Keel Laying
Ceremony27
Jun 2013

The Navy
celebrated the keel laying of the future USS Little Rock LCS 9
at the Marinette Marine shipyard in Marinette, Wisconsin, where ship will be built. During the ceremony,
ship sponsor Janee Bonner, wife of U.S. Rep. Joe Bonner (AL)
authenticated the keel by having her signature welded into it.

Photos below are from the Keel Laying Ceremony. (Click any photo to enlarge it.)

The nation's ninth
Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) may be named Little Rock, but there was
certainly nothing little about the recent celebrations that occurred in
Marinette, Wis.

The U.S. Navy celebrated the keel laying of the future USS Little Rock
June 27 at the Marinette Marine shipyard in Wisconsin, where LCS 9 is
under construction.

During the traditional ceremony, ship sponsor Janee Bonner, the wife of
U.S. Rep. Joe Bonner of Alabama, authenticated the keel by having her
signature welded into it. She was assisted by Chuck Goddard, President
& CEO of Marinette Marine Corporation.

"It's a privilege to be named the ship sponsor of the future USS Little
Rock" said Mrs. Janee Bonner. "The keel laying marks the beginning of a
lifelong commitment to the ship and to the crews, and I am proud and
honored to support the brave crews that defend our country.

The same day, just one mile from the Marinette Marine shipyard,
Lockheed Martin held a ceremonial ribbon cutting to celebrate the
opening of a new leased facility in downtown Marinette. Lockheed Martin
will occupy 16,000 square feet of the previously vacant space, which
can house 46 employees who support testing for the LCS program. With
$500,000 spent in renovations, Lockheed Martin contracted local
Marinette companies to upgrade the site.

The Little Rock is the fourth LCS being built at the Marinette Marine
shipyard. The Lockheed Martin-led team built the Navy's first LCS, the
USS Freedom, which is currently in Singapore as part of its 10-month
deployment to Southeast Asia.

USS Fort Worth, commissioned in September, is conducting post-shakedown
availability following successful Final Contractor's Trials in April.
Construction of Milwaukee (LCS 5) and Detroit (LCS 7) is underway, and
long-lead construction material is being procured for Sioux City (LCS
11).

The Navy awarded contracts to the team for the Wichita (LCS 13) and the
Billings (LCS 15) in March.

Blog post on the LCS program
from Rear Admiral John F. Kirby

10 Jun 2013

Rear Admiral John F. Kirby, Chief of
Information for the
Navy, states:

I’ve been following closely all the debate over the
Littoral Combat
Ship. I’ve even chimed in here and there to refute what I thought was
bad reporting and erroneous claims by those using old information. I
figure that’s part of my job as the Navy’s spokesman—not to staunchly
defend but rather to inform and to educate.The truth is, these are healthy debates. We need them.
Talking about
problems is a good thing. And yet, as a guy who also taught naval
history at the Academy, I can't help but think how very often we've
been here before. Throughout our history, it seems, the boldest ideas
are often the hardest to accept.Take legendary shipbuilder Joshua Humphrey’s, contracted
in 1794 to
build a new class of frigate for the fledgling American Navy. Longer
and broader than traditional frigates, Humphrey’s ships were designed
with graceful underwater lines for speed, packing an impressive 44 guns
and over an acre of sail.But to many, the design seemed freakish. With its angled
hull curving
inward from the waterline, unusually flush decks and several feet of
extra beam, it was deemed too ungainly to be of service.Worse yet, Humphrey’s design had only partial support from
a reluctant
Congress not particularly interested in stirring up the ire of the
British or French, both of whom were at each other's throats again. We
didn’t need a Navy, not now, they said. And even if we did, it
shouldn't consist of anything quite as drastic as Humphrey’s frigates.All that changed in 1797, when, in response to warming
relations
between the United States and Great Britain, French privateers began
raiding American commerce. By the summer of that year, they had
captured no less than 300 U.S. ships.In a huff and in a hurry, Congress ordered the completion
of three of
Humphrey’s frigates: United States, Constitution and Constellation.They would accord themselves well, proving vastly superior
in speed and
durability to their French foes. In one of the most famous battles of
that short, little undeclared war, Constellation forced the surrender
of one of France’s mightiest frigates, Insurgente, in little more than
an hour. Humphrey’s frigates would go on to even greater glory against
the Barbary pirates of the North African coast a few short years later.The critics had been silenced.Silencing critics became almost sport for a whole
generation of ship
designers and engineers in the early 1800s. Robert Fulton shut them up
by proving the power of steam over wind; Commander John Dahlgren did it
with a revolutionary new gun capable of far greater range and accuracy,
and Swedish designer John Ericsson awed them with something called a
gun turret.Ericsson didn’t stop there, of course. He went on to
design a whole new
class of warship. He called them Monitors, and they changed naval
warfare forever.The Monitor's case is instructive for any discussion of
LCS. Nearly
everything about it was new and untried. Its features were striking: a
long, low stealthy profile, making it hard to locate; a shallow draft
and good maneuverability, making it perfect for work in the littorals;
and a radically new weapons system that boasted the largest and most
powerful gun in the Navy’s inventory—John Dahlgren’s.The ship operated with less than a third the number of
Sailors required
of conventional warships. And it was multi-mission in scope, capable of
offshore operations and supporting campaigns on land. Even the material
used to form the hull—iron—was revolutionary and added to the ship’s
defensive capability. Ericsson called it his “self-propelled battery at sea.”Critics called it a mistake. Too small, too slow and too
lightly armed
it would, they argued, be no match for the larger, cannon-bristling
sloops of the Confederate Navy. Even Union Sailors had taken to calling
it a “cheesebox on a raft.”It wasn’t until much later in the war, after improvements
had been made
to the design, that the Monitor-class would prove its worth.There were Monitors with Farragut at Mobile Bay. They took
part in the
Red River campaigns of the West and proved ideal for coastal blockading
work. A Monitor even served as then-Admiral Dahlgren’s flagship during
the 1863 attack on Charleston. They proved durable ships and had an
incredibly long service life, the last of them not being stricken from
Navy rolls until 1937.The spirit of Monitor—and every other type of
revolutionary ship—is
alive and well in LCS. As Monitor ushered in the era of armored ships
and sounded the death knell for those of wood, so too will LCS usher in
an era of a netted, flexible and modular capabilities.With its interchangeable mission packages, its raw speed,
and its
ability to operate with so many other smaller navies around the world,
LCS gives us a geo-strategic advantage we simply haven't enjoyed since
the beginnings of the Cold War.The response by Singapore and by other Pacific partners to
Freedom's
deployment, for example, has been overwhelmingly positive. They like
the ship precisely because it isn't big, heavily-armed or overtly
offensive. They like it because they can work with it. I fail to see
how that’s a bad thing in today's maritime environment.Let’s be honest. LCS was never intended to take on another
fleet all by
its own, and nobody ever expected it to bristle with weaponry. LCS was
built to counter submarines, small surface attack craft, and mines in
coastal areas. Thanks to its size and shallow draft, it can also
conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations,
maritime security and intercept operations, as well as homeland defense
missions. It can support Marines ashore, insert special operations
forces and hunt down pirates in places we can't go right now.Let me say that again ... in places we cant go right now.That counts for something. The CNO always talks about
building a Navy
that can be where it matters and ready when it matters. Well, the
littorals matter. The littorals are where products come to market; it’s
where seaborne trade originates. Littorals include the major straits,
canals, and other maritime choke points so necessary to this traffic.
It’s also where a whole lot of people live. Coastal cities are home to
more than three billion people right now, a figure that some experts
estimate will double by 2025.In addition to strains on local economies and the
environment, this
rapid population growth will continue to exacerbate political, social,
cultural and religious tensions. You don't have to look any further
than today's headlines to see the truth in that. Consider the Levant,
North Africa, the South China Seas. And you don't have to look any
further than at our current fleet of ships to see what we’re missing.We need this ship. We also need to be more clear about
it—what it is
and what it isn't. This ship is a light frigate, a corvette. I never
understood why we didn’t just call it that in the first place. Maybe
it’s because a corvette conveys something less muscular, less macho. I
don't know. Maybe it’s because a corvette is something completely new
to us, at least those of us with no memories of picket destroyers,
PT-boats, and hydrofoils.Remember the whole debate over the Perry-class
frigates? I sure
do. My first ship was a frigate. Too small, the critics said, too slow,
too vulnerable. It couldn't defend itself, they argued. The 76mm gun
was little more than a pea-shooter. The Phalanx system, poorly situated
aft on the O-2 level, fired rounds too small to be effective against
incoming missiles. The sonar? Well, let’s just say that
some people compared it being both deaf and blind. Sailors on cruisers
and destroyers used to joke that “they wished they were on a ‘fig’ so
they could get sub pay.”As one contemporary observer noted, “When
[then] Soviet Admiral of the Fleet Sergei Gorshkov goes to bed at
night, he's not lying awake counting Oliver Hazard Perry frigates.”And yet, the little frigates became one of the most
useful—and most
popular—ships in the Navy. “By saving
money, manpower, and operating costs, the FFGs helped the Navy pass
through the economic trough of the 1970s and, with upgrades available
from increased defense spending in the 1980s, have served as a reliable
platform through the end of the 20th century,” writes Dr.
Timothy L. Francis, a naval historian.“Moreover,” he
continues, “without these low-end
ships the U.S. Navy
never would have been able to grow to the numbers needed to conduct the
last phase of the Cold War, which allowed the service to meet the
multi-faceted challenges of that period.”Criticism is good. Criticism is healthy. We should have to
justify to
the very public we are charged to protect how we are spending their
hard-earned tax dollars. And we are. We’re working very hard to be as
forthright and open as we can about all the problems still plaguing
both variants of the ship. But let’s not forget that it was critics who
laughed at the aircraft carrier, disparaged the F/A-18 Hornet and the
MV-22, and scoffed at the idea of propelling submarine through the
water with the power locked inside an atom.The critics have been plenty wrong before. And even the
most skeptical
of us have to be willing to admit that they will be wrong again.Look, LCS isn't perfect—by any stretch. But it’s
still
experimental. It’s still a bit like Humphrey’s Constellation and
Ericcson’s Monitor when they first joined the fleet. New and untried,
yes, but valuable in their own way to making us a more capable Navy. It
just takes a little time to prove the concept. Sailors didn’t exactly
clamor for PT-boat duty in World War II until it became a tactically
proven and exciting option for them.Navy leaders have been very clear that all options for LCS
remain on
the table. If we find that LCS needs to be more lethal, we’ll make it
more lethal. If we find the ship needs to be manned or maintained
differently, we’ll do that too. Just like with the Perry-class, we’ll
upgrade and we’ll update. We’ll change.But one thing that hasn’t changed is the dangerous world
we live in.
The threats and the opportunities we face are real. And, quite frankly,
they are every bit as “multi-faceted” as were those we faced at the end
of the Cold War.As Aviation Week’s Mike Fabey wrote recently, “The Navy needs to rid the service of the
‘old think.’ ”“Whether the Navy
achieves
operational or acquisition success with LCS remains to be seen,”
he noted. “But we do most definitely
have a ship that is designed to be operated far differently than any
other warship before it. At the high-altitude conceptual level, that is
precisely what the Navy wanted.”He’s absolutely right. We want—and we need—a new class of
ships that
can meet these new challenges, that can get us on station fast and
close, one that can perform in the coastal areas where our partners,
our forces and our potential foes will also operate.To the critics I say, this is such a ship. Give it time.

Update

04
Dec 2012

USS
Little Rock Association President Steve Chase
informed Association members: "As an
update...
I just talked with the
coordinator about progression of LCS-9. Construction should
be underway
soon with a keel laying targeted for the summer of 2013; christening
slated for fall of 2014; and commissioning notionally planned for the
spring of 2016."

The
next Littoral Combat Ship
will be named "USS Little Rock"
15 Jul 2011

WASHINGTON, DC - Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced today that
the next Freedom-Class littoral combat ship (LCS) will be named the USS
Little Rock (LCS 9).

Little Rock is the second ship to bear the name of the capital city in
Arkansas.

The USS Little Rock (CL-92/CLG-4/CG-4) was originally a Cleveland-class
light cruiser that served after World War II, and was one of six to be
converted to a Galveston-class guided missile cruiser.

She was decommissioned in 1976 and now holds a place of honor as a
museum ship in Buffalo, NY.

Little Rock will be designed to defeat growing littoral threats and
provide access and dominance in the coastal waters.

A fast, agile surface combatant, the LCS provides the required war
fighting capabilities and operational flexibility to execute focused
missions close to the shore, such as mine warfare, anti-submarine
warfare, and surface warfare.

The LCS Class consists of two different hull forms, the Freedom variant
and Independence variant ‚ a semi-planing monohull and an
aluminum
trimaran, designed and built by two industry teams;
Lockheed Martin
and Austel USA.

These seaframes will be outfitted with reconfigurable payloads, called
mission packages, which can be changed out quickly as combat needs
demand.

These mission packages are supported by special detachments that will
deploy manned and unmanned vehicles and sensors in support of mine,
undersea and surface warfare missions.

Little Rock will be 378 feet in length, have a waterline beam of 57
feet, displace approximately 3,000 tons, and make speed in excess of 40
knots.

The construction will be led by a Lockheed Martin industry team in
Marinette, Wis.

U.S. Department of Defense
Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs)

Announcement
of LCS 6 and LCS 8 Names
24
Mar 2011

Remarks by the Honorable Ray Mabus, Secretary of
the Navy

Mobile, AL

"Joe
(Joe
Rella, Austal USA President and Chief Operating Officer), thank you, and Senator
Sessions and Congressman Bonner, Mayor Jones, and some of the best
workers in the world. This is a happy day. Last week we announced the
contract award for the seventh and eighth ships of the littoral combat
ship class – so we’re going to be keeping you busy here Austal.

We’re building
these ships here for a couple reasons. One is that Austal and General
Dynamics worked really hard to get the cost down. And we wouldn’t be
here today if it wasn’t for Senator Sessions and Congressman Bonner
getting Congress to push through legislation last November and December
after the election in the waning days of Congress to allow us to build both versions of the ship,
to buy 10 from Austal and 10 from Marinette so that we can get more
ships faster, for less money to the Navy. That is a good deal for the
Navy, that is a good deal for the taxpayers and that’s a good deal for
America. So, thank you and thank y’all.

The second reason
we’re building them here is because y’all build great ships.

I have got a
T-shirt that I was given to me on my last visit here and it’s got a
picture of an LCS built here at Austal. And it says, “A pirate’s worst
nightmare.” Well, I tell you, it’s not only a pirate’s worst nightmare,
it’s a drug runner’s worst nightmare. It’s a submariner's worst
nightmare. It’s anybody who wants to do harm to the United States of
America or to the United States Navy – it’s their worst nightmare, too.

The LCS 2 that
you have built here is out on sea trials right now and I can't wait to
get it deployed.

The LCS that’s
already been deployed in the Caribbean in the first three weeks seized
over three tons of cocaine. And the reason that it did was, these drug
runners’ fast boats would be going along and they'd see a Navy ship on
the horizon, they'd see a gray hull and they'd just assume they could
outrun it. Nope, couldn't do it.

The ability with
shallow draft, very fast speed and modular weapons systems so that you
can take one off, put the other one on – this is going to be one of the
backbones of the fleet.

We’re going to
buy 55 LCSs with Congress’ approval so that America will be safe,
America will be protected, America will be secure for decades to come,
thanks to the things you are doing here.

Now, I’ve always
said that being Secretary of the Navy is one of the coolest jobs on
earth, and one of the best things about it is you get to name the ships
that sail on behalf of the United States as part of our Navy. And so 6
and 8 just doesn’t have that ring to it, so I thought they needed
names. So I want to announce today that LCS 6 will be named for
Jackson, Mississippi, which is where I’m from, and LCS 8 for
Montgomery, Alabama.

I picked these
two names because they represent two great capitals. They represent two
great states, but they also represent the workforce that’s out here. We
got a lot of people from Alabama, but we also got a lot of people from
Mississippi that come over and work here at Austal. And this is to
honor you, too.

Jackson has never
had a ship named after it, and so this will be the first that has ever
been named the USS Jackson. There has been one USS Montgomery, named
after the state capital here, but it sailed during the Spanish-American
War – it was a cruiser. So it’s been a few years since Montgomery has
been similarly honored.

These two ships
will take forth the history and the pride of Alabama and Mississippi
for decades to come as they sail around the world, as they do the
business of the United States.

Jackson and
Montgomery have been through a lot. They have survived wars, they have
survived other tumult. They have been part of the crucible that was the
Civil Rights revolution. These two ships, the Jackson and the
Montgomery, will protect the freedoms that were won in 1776 and in the
1960s. These two ships represent what is best about America and how
good American products are that are built here at Austal.